On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 4:36 AM, Nicholas H.Tollervey <ntoll at ntoll.org> wrote:
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>> Hi,
>> I'm a former teacher currently working as a Python developer and I've
> stepped up to help organise the "Education" track at this year's
> PyconUK (happening in September - see http://pyconuk.org).
>
That all sounds like excellent thinking and planning Nicholas.
My experience is a minority will seize on the new toys / tools and
share their delight with peers. Many will only be swayed if they see
student enthusiasm tick up as well, but that requires getting that far
(so where's the door to get in again? -- not math class they say).
The idea of a classroom especially outfitted for computer-based
learning is still new and undeveloped. The idea of "passing a
terminal around" or better, having students enabled to share their
screens in real time, front projected, or to join the teacher at the
command line (two keyboards feed the same console), or to split the
console among screens... we don't try enough such experiments.
I always thought HP would get into that, but then "selling classrooms"
is not quite like "selling cath labs" (more GE's line of business) --
could be though, if schools were built more like hospitals.
PythonAnyhwere: https://www.pythonanywhere.com/http://python-in-the-lab.blogspot.de/ (Lantz is looking interesting)
More open sorcery needed.
The economic bottleneck in my state of Oregon is that CS is an
elective meaning it doesn't count towards requirements.
The idea that getting serious at the command line, learning all that
open source jazz, could count towards the math requirement was what we
floated, as three years of math is required, by order of the state.
The lawyers who write such standards *may* know computers exist but
this should not be taken for granted. Remember, Oregon is home to
places like Boring, Fossil and Remote.
And Dufur:
>>> "Ask not what Dufur can dufur you, but what you can dufur Dufur".replace("dufur", "do for") # Heh.
So say you've done your algebra / geometry and need one more year of
math, and maybe calculus isn't quite your cup of tea.
We've got this other thing for you then. Piece of cake.
Didn't fly yet though, except informally it's what half the kids are
doing anyway. Like my daughter (18) got help rooting her phone to
upgrade the OS, but don't expect any classes in your high school to
help with that. You're lucky if there's one dusty room with Ubuntu
somewhere.
If you wanna learn fast, make up excuses to stay home, where the
bandwidth is better. Sad but true.
But with teachers coming up to speed more.... could be a whole new
ballgame. School could become relevant again, maybe!
Kirby